Bone and silk are inspiring Neri Oxman to invent new ways of construction

This robot-arm is 3D printing its own home -- inspired by human bones. "We can't print with calcium," Neri Oxman says. "So the idea is to print with concrete but vary its density as a function of the load, much as bone does." The robot prints and mills an expanding foam that doubles as a mould for concrete walls, and as an insulating layer; Oxman hopes that the printing process will eventually include wiring and plumbing.

Oxman, a designer and architect who heads the Mediated Matter research group at the Media Lab, is stealing nature's best design principles and applying them to architectural creations. Each of her graduate students is exploring a biological system and matching it with an existing digital fabrication technology, such as computer numerical control and 3D printers. "Look at spiders," Oxman says. "They use about eight different properties of silk for different functions. The spider is like a multimaterial 3D printer."

Spiders turn out to be a theme of the lab: the Spiderbot project takes it cues from a spider's web. It's a 3D-printing gantry you can strap to your back and carry: four cables, each with a motor, attach to trees and can lift four tonnes between them, meaning the system can print over 3,370-metres cubed, even in challenging terrains. Oxman calls it the "largest 3D printer in the world". If combined with the bone-inspired building project, it could print out architectural structures anywhere, on demand. Another project,

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CNSilk, investigates silk as a building material. "My ambition is to print a tent-sized silk cocoon within a year."

Within ten years, "we'll see completely different construction technologies," says Oxman, who recently showed some of her work at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. "[That building] signifies everything we're moving away from -- the culture of assembly, with each material providing a different function. That's my dream -- to build at the scale of the Pompidou, but celebrate this approach."